From the Critique of the Heavens to the Critique of the Earth: A Contribution to the Reconstruction of Karl Marx’s unfinished Critique of Political Theology

This article reconstructs Karl Marx’s incomplete and hitherto ignored 1843 critique of political theology, that is, the predominant understanding of the state as a separate and sovereign subject. Careful analysis of the text and its intellectual context reveals how contemporary post-Hegelian debates sensitized him to the problematic of political theology and provided him with the conceptual resources to overcome its descriptive and prescriptive limitations, without resorting to abstract negation. Instead, he showed that it was precisely the social significance of this idea and the associated practices that constituted the modern state and proceeded to provide a highly original analysis of its earthly existence within and as a structurally integrated part of the modern capitalist system.